Fighting Caravans (1931)

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

OK, so why do I mention that it's pre-code? Well, how many pre-1965 westerns have white men getting hooked up with Native American women as a GOOD THING? How about the line where "Indians have no use for blond women"? Even having a foreigner getting hitched to all-American Gary Cooper in the West could be frowned upon in some circles in the 1930's. So, we have a pre-code western here. I love pre-code films just to catch a line or so that is not considered family friendly. I happen to watch a lot of different media, with pre-code old films being one of my interests for entertainment, I also watch adult themed cartoons like Family Guy. On the Cartoon Channel at night they play mature cartoons and one of them is called "The Venture Brothers". In that show they have a spoof of an elderly Sean Connery superhero and I swear that Ernest Torrence (who steals the show here) was the inspiration for the character and the voice! Seems like some off coloured jokes going on but I could be wrong. I give it a 7, highlights are pre-code and higher production standards then a B flick. However, the audio is often bad and the version I watched looked really chopped up on Retro TV. Probably not a good thing to give it a higher rating, it's no The Searchers but was fun and my wife even was into it, so maybe a good date flick for an old western film. 7 of 10.

In the early days of sound Paramount purchased a number of Zene Grey stories to be filmed, mostly as B picture attractions and done by their rising new B picture cowboy, Randolph Scott. Fighting Caravans however got the A picture treatment and starred Gary Cooper. Cooper plays a young hell raising scout who's been taught the ways of the woods by two grizzled old timers, Ernest Torrence and Tully Marshall. All three of them sign on to guide a wagon train in the 1860s west. Adding to the attraction for Cooper is pretty young Lily Damita who earlier on pretended to be his wife to get him out of trouble with a sheriff.A lot of the same ground was covered by Twentieth Century Fox the year before with The Big Trail and its new star John Wayne. The Big Trail however failed to find its audience, but Fighting Caravans with proved box office star Cooper showed a respectable profit for Paramount-Publix as the white mountain studio was called at that time. Of course both films owe plenty to James Cruze's silent classic, The Covered Wagon.Like in The Big Trail the villain here is a renegade white man, stirring up the Indians. The very rousing attack on the wagon train during the climax had elements of it borrowed over 20 years later in the James Stewart western, Bend of the River.A whole lot of Gary Cooper's early sound films for some reason are never shown. Possible that prints no longer exist. Though Fighting Caravans is not a great film, it's an entertaining one. In fact a few years later it was remade by Randolph Scott in Wagon Wheels where that film used all kinds of stock footage from this one.

To fully appreciate FIGHTING CARAVANS, one must know a little about THE COVERED WAGON, released in 1923 and the first Western epic. For decades this silent movie was hailed as the finest Western ever, and even in 1968, Bosley Crowther's popular book, THE GREAT FILMS, listed it as one of fifty greatest motion pictures. Few would claim that today, although it is still an entertaining silent. What remains undeniable is THE COVERED WAGON's influence. Other big-budget Westerns soon followed, and, by the talking era, Fox released THE BIG TRAIL (a virtual remake of THE COVERED WAGON) and Paramount released FIGHTING CARAVANS (a virtual sequel).Those of us who love THE COVERED WAGON adore the two lead supporting characters: trackers Bill Jackson and Jim Bridger, played by Ernest Torrence and Tully Marshall. They play them again in this film, only now they're older, because FIGHTING CARAVANS was filmed eight years after, and their increased age actually adds a curious poignancy. Slightly different from the plot conflicts in THE COVERED WAGON, this sequel hinges on whether Jackson and Bridger can both persuade their new, handsome protégé to continue tracking with them and not settle down to marry. However, just as the two have aged, so has the west. With the trains being connected, it is obvious that the trackers will no longer be needed. Not surprisingly for a Western with this sort of elegiaic theme, both Jackson and Bridger die in the film's climax, fighting renegades and Indians. (This, of course, was not how the actual Jim Bridger ended his days, and, yes, the film's portrayal of Native Americans is not accurate either.)Lili Damita, who would later become the first Mrs. Errol Flynn, had one of her best roles as the civilizing influence on the young handsome tracker, convincing him to veer away from a profession that would die with changing times. Gary Cooper plays the young tracker, and he wears buckskin far better than J. Warren Kerrigan did in THE COVERED WAGON. Cooper, in fact, plays another of his callow rakes he did so often in the early thirties, from THE VIRGINIAN to IF I HAD A MILLION to even A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and it's always odd to see him play such parts before Mr. Deeds would change his image afterward.Roughly the same year as this film, MGM released BILLY THE KID, Fox released THE BIG TRAIL, and R.K.O. released CIMMARON; all were very expensive, very spectacular Westerns. FIGHTING CARAVANS was Paramount's contender with these others, and it was a film so big, with so much location work, that two directors were ultimately required. Like the other big Westerns of its time, it contains crude, almost amateur-like, moments. One could even complain that the broad acting of the early talkies is totally at odds with a Western---a genre that traditionally relies on laconic, expressionless characters. However, for those who love curios, for those who love film history and Western history, and for those who love THE COVERED WAGON, this film is a charm.

This film, Originally titled BLAZING ARROWS, is the first of several based upon a Zane Grey novel published only two years prior, and the version that is most faithful to the book, while being one of the largest budgeted Westerns of the early sound era, with the viewer advised to remember that the period of the narrative (1862) antedated its audience only to the extent that the Great Depression does to spectators today. The story tells of a caravan of freight wagons journeying from Independence, Missouri, to the West Coast during a pre-railroad time, with settlers accompanying, and the procession's four month struggle with hostile Indians, very harsh winter weather, forbidding terrain and renegade betrayal, and is particularly full of interesting detail as to the methods of the freightmen and their metier. Gary Cooper portrays Clint Belmet, a Missouri guide who has been reared and trained as a member of a successive generation of scouts and trappers by two veterans of the breed, Bill Jackson (Ernest Torrence) and Jim Bridger (Tully Marshall), who are unaware that their way of life is to be ended by an advancing intracontinental rail system, only temporarily slowed by the War Between the States. Because of plot circumstances, Belmet must pretend to be married to a lone traveller, Felice (Lily Damita), and their seesaw relationship provides one of the main themes of a wideranging scenario, with Belmet and his mentors trumpeting of the glories of their fading way of life while Felice seeks to inculcate within her swain a sense of domestic virtue. The cinematography of Lee Garmes is very effective with its images of the travails of the wagon train and his work is not compromised by the editing which is crisp and appropriate for a film as episodic as is this one. The work's most serious failing is a lack of a consistent point of view, as it is essentially a comedy, due largely to a highly effectual performance from Torrence, here permitted to utilize his native Scottish burr to its fullest, and is somewhat reduced in impact during scenes of action and romance as a result of only cursory emphasis upon each.